(10 May 2003) SHOTLIST
1. Various of people waiting to welcome ayatollah
STORYLINE
The leader of the largest Iraqi Shiite Muslim group opposed to Saddam Hussein returned to Iraq on Saturday after two decades in exile.
Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim is the leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq.
The son of another grand ayatollah, he had been in exile in Iran and under protection of its Shiite religious leaders since fleeing there in 1980.
The ayatollah crossed the frontier into Iraq at a desert border crossing that had been a no-man's land for years.
His 100-vehicle convoy rolled off toward the southern city of Basra, where thousands were waiting to welcome him.
Al-Hakim arives in Iraq to expectations that he will figure prominently in the future of the country he was kept from for so long.
His group, the SCIRI, wants Iraq's future to be governed by Islamic law and the ayatollah has said in recent days that SCIRI seeks to "realise the will of the Iraqi people", rebuild the country and establish good links with neighbours.
While al-Hakim, also known as Baqir, remained in Iran during the weeks after the war last month, his brother, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, returned to Iraq in advance to pave the way for the ayatollah's return.
The brother, who commands SCIRI's armed wing, has been meeting a small core group of returned exiles who appear poised to become the nucleus of a new government installed by US occupation forces.
Many have compared al-Hakim's return to that of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who spent 14 years in exile in Iraq before returning to lead Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution and lead its clerical regime until his death in 1989.
The Shiites, a minority in the Islamic world, constitute a 60-percent majority in Iraq and suffered persecution and oppression under Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime.
Iraqi Shiites are Arab, not Persian like their Iranian counterparts, and have a strong sense of Iraqi nationalism.
During the Iran-Iraq war from 1980-88, they did not rise up against Saddam.
A few years later, Saddam brutally crushed a Shiite uprising which broke out in 1991 after the Gulf War.
The US is wary of any Iranian-style theocracy taking control in Iraq.
It is particularly jittery about the possibility that a democratic vote might produce a conservative, Islamic-oriented government with close ties to Iran's anti-American Shiite clerics.
Washington has accused Tehran - which gave al-Hakim refuge for so long - of meddling in Iraqi affairs.
SCIRI opposes a US administration in Iraq but has close ties with the rest of the US-backed opposition, including the Kurds and the London-based Iraqi National Congress.
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